News
Iowa congressman blasts HSUS
U.S. Congressman Steve King of Iowa does not sugarcoat his distaste for animal rights extremist organizations.
Specifically, he says the Humane Society of the United States is a “dishonest” organization and an “enemy” of livestock and feed grain production.
“I understand what their agenda is. Their agenda is to take meat off of the table for America and the world,” King said on NCBA’s Beltway Beef report. “They are vegetarians—they confessed that under oath, at an ag committee hearing—and they said, ‘but we don’t want to impose our values on you’.
“Yes, they do.”
King urges agriculture to align and push back on HSUS.
“Anytime that we give HSUS any room at all, that’s just like backing up when a bully pokes you in the chest,” he says. “You can only back up so long—and there’s no reason to back up the first time.”
King, a Republican, represents Iowa’s fifth district in Congress. However, due to reapportionment, King is now running for re-election in Iowa’s fourth district.
His opponent in the general election is expected to be Christie Vilsack, wife of U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
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I think Ag should remember that people vote with their heart, stomach and pocketbook. With their heart they vote for larger animal cages and free-range (whatever that is). With their stomach, they will buy meat at the market. With their pocketbook, they may well vote for smaller cages when the price of chicken reaches $10/lb. HSUS will never be able to legislate vegetarianism, but they can fool voters into voting for higher prices, but not for long. Yet, look at the auto industry – cars are so expensive because of the safety and environmental requirements, yet folks still buy cars, even seek out the more expensive ones because of the new equipment and environmental factors. So Ag, calm down, do as the organics do. Use the HSUS campaigns to your advantage – advertise how your chickens roam free, your pigs spin in their gestation cages and your cows feed on grass, and then charge more for such meat. Oh wait, that’s right, producers don’t set prices, processors and retailers do! Perhaps the real enemy are the processors and retailers for not allowing Ag to take advantage of the consumer changes. Oh yes, processors and retailers also can afford lobbyists to convince our politicians that the real enemy is someone else, such as HSUS. Hmmm.
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I love the taste of meat, but after the Conference Agricultural Appropriations Committee decided not to include language specifically prohibiting the funding of meat inspectors for horse, I have really struggled at the meat counter and when traveling. I look at steaks now and think of pictures I have seen of horse steak and beef steak in glass counters side by side, and I wonder if I could tell the difference if I were to see both through the butcher glass. What I have learned through learning about horse slaughter is an education I would have been happier not having, but I have it now and it is ruining my appetite.
I agree with Robert. I know lots of people who no longer buy meat from the grocer but through a network of local farmers. How local? Well, they may devote Saturday morning to driving 30 to 45 minutes one way to purchase free range chicken. They pay more in dollars and in time, but they feel like their families’ health is at stake. Cruelty is an issue, but so are antibiotics, hormones, and concerns about other substances. Of course, having enough money to purchase the food you or adjusting what you want to eat according to what you can afford to purchase is the bottom line.
The other part of this is that most Americans do not think of HSUS as an extremist organization. In fact, I had never heard of HSUS being called an extreme animal rights group until I started following the horse slaughter debate.
Our state department of agriculture says that practicing good animal husbandry creates better products and the consumer wants good, quality products. Therefore, it doesn’t seem to have a “beef” with HSUS.
Law makers who refer to HSUS as an organization that wants to end the meat industry run a serious risk of sounding like “nuts” to voters. Even Dr. Temple Grandin talks about cruel handling in her book Animals Make Us Human. She discusses this book the normal behaviors that animals express. Animal rights does not mean the same thing as civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, etc. It refers to the “rights” or the rightness that animals have to express their species specific behaviors. The word “rights” is unfortunate because people don’t understand it, and they think it is just as crazy as saying the HSUS wants to end animal ownership and meat eating.
For example, pigs are highly intelligent animals. Intelligent animals are curious and expressive, but pigs in gestation crates leave no opportunity for pigs to behave like, well, pigs. It is hard to imagine how such an animal copes with being confined to gestational crates. If these conditions challenge Dr. Grandin whose greatest claim to fame is her design of cattle slaughter facilities to allow for their need to cluster together when fearful, one can only imagine what these conditions do to challenge people with less background in animal agriculture.
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That’s right—keep going for compromising with the H$U$ against animal ag, and that will be allowing the H$U$ (and other anti-animal-use orgs) to keep “moving the middle” with their *propaganda mill* BIG LIES [see Alinski’s ‘Rules for Radicals’].
Look at what H$U$’s leadership have said in the past about animal use–pretty damning!!! OF COURSE, they aren’t gonna say that now as they’ve gotten older and smarter with their deceitful misinformation and vilification of animal industries. Do they want to eliminate animal use? Well, that would be like killing their own “cash cow”, since it would be hard to solicit donations if there were no animals to USE to get dollars from the gullible and research-lazy. They just want to continually turn the screws to CONTROL and limit animal use as much as society will allow them to do. Fortunately, people are FIGHTING BACK against the “animal rights” industry, and that makes the AR industry attack back with more disinformation and vilification [typical attack: “You don’t agree with us, then you must be FOR animal cruelty”]. NONSENSE.
And no, “animal rights” is NOT about an animal’s right to good treatment. “Animal rights” is an anti-societal philosophy of no animal use, and therefore should be considered a politically incorrect concept. “Animal welfare” is about treating animals well while using them, and that is NOT the same as “animal rights”.
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Unfortunately most do not realize that HSUS wants no more use of animals for anything ever. Most of their “members” do not realize this. ALDF and HSUS attorneys draw up bills and unfortunately they are passed. These laws give title to search people’s homes, take animals and even if found innocent in court, often times the shelter or agency keeping the dogs for “chain of command” charge 100,000 dollars lein fee which has to be paid before dogs are returned….in the end, winning in court means loosing your farm animals, horses or dogs, even though no abuse has been found. It is about much more than abuse of animals, it is about the holocoust of animals by people who believe in the utalitarian, anti-vivisection and abolitionist based on philosophers from the 17 and 1800s when things were very different in the world. Of course in the late 1960s and early 1970s the Oxford Group was formed in the UK as a think tank of sorts consisting of many who moved to America to teach their animal rights theories in major universities the propaganda that was developed within the Oxford Group.
It is interesting that Wayne Pacelle while still in college and his job at Friends for Animals was one of the first hunt saboteurs in the USA and I believe has at least three arrests for his part in hunt saboteuring. Does he really care about animals or just wants animals out of human hands to act naturally in nature, where they would not live a peaceful life at all. Wayne Pacelle’s organizations have a seat at the WTO and also in the UN for the proposed of Agenda 21 as does many other radical organizations. We are headed for a different world and when we stop to figure how much ALF, Justice Department, Negoation is Over and HSUS and PETA has removed from the USA economy…..to say the least the figure would be staggering. They ought to be ashamed. -
Don’t get so upset about sows being in those tiny crates. They were invented for a humane purpose to keep the mother from rolling over on her babies and thus killing them! By and large they do not spend their entire lives in there, only when pregnant. Many years ago I worked for an advertising agency and one of the clients manufactured the farrowing crates. That is how I learned about them. Do your own research. Don’t rely on the misinformation doled out by HSUS and PETA.
i myself love meat…but because of the cruelty in the big factory farms , i just cant stomache it anymore.